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If I were to get one of the Unreal Tournament games at this point, are there still people playing online? If so, are they all burly men, if so how burly, and would they use lube?

Strangely enough, I think the newest UT is the deadest. I still play UT99 occasionally and can find games pretty easily, especially on the weekends. UT2004 probably has just as many as 99, if not more.

it probably has something to do with my age, but ill always see doom/duke/decent/quake as the golden era of fps

Everyone agrees with you. Not just old people.

Yeah, it's not your age. It's just the truth. I was too young to play most of those games when they were released and I still agree with you.

I think I'm going to reinstall Duke just because those screens really make me want to play it. If anyone else has Duke urges to fulfill, gog.com actually has the game on sale this weekend for 3 dollars. 3 dollars. If you don't already own it, that will be the best 3 bucks you ever spent.

I really disliked the art direction and style in UT3. UT99 and 2004 were all about the day-glo sci-fi settings. Fantastical stuff where you could just as easily be screaming across the terrain on a high speed train, or in a convoy of mega cargo trucks. You could be flag capping on an asteroid spinning in space (I actually got a bit of vertigo the first time I played Facing Worlds), or insta-gibbing around gigantic trees in a forest at night. You could be launching assaults on vessels in space before landing and taking the fight inside, or you could be bounding across the tops of 3 ultra-massive super-skyscrapers that are so far above the Earth that gravity is a plaything.

With UT3 they decided "no, we're actually serious and grim now" for some reason. The whole art style was turned into super-unsaturated "Gears of Unreal" monochrome worlds. Why? What purpose did that serve? You couldn't even tell what colour teams people were on by default, so they literally had to make people GLOW bright red or blue at a distance because otherwise you had no idea what you were shooting at. They really lost what could have been a more unique look to the franchise, and instead made the visuals look sharper but what they were actually showing with them was attempting to be generic GRIMDARK.

I will never understand why they felt it so important to try and shove Gears of Wars art style into UT3, but it just didn't work.

subedii on March 2012

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anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular

Wasn't it made RIGHT in the middle of the gritty-grim-browngrey heyday? Things are moving away from that now thank christ, but back then it was unthinkable to try to be 'fantastical', which is what colour was apparently...

When I started playing Mass Effect 2, I spent a lot of time trying to create a pretty Shephard and I was never quite happy with the result. Eventually, I got really frustrated with myself, because I wanted to get on with the game, but I couldn't get past character creation. Yes, I can be seriously picky designing characters.

In the end, I decided to do the opposite. Instead of trying to create a pretty Shephard, I went for an ugly or at least an unconventional one. Now, she is one of my favorites and I can't imagine playing Mass Effect without her.

I did the same thing with my male Shep. My guy isn't ugly but he's no fashion model, and now he seems to fit Mark Meer's voice so well that when I look at other playthrough's and see their Shep talking it...doesn't feel right!

When I started playing Mass Effect 2, I spent a lot of time trying to create a pretty Shephard and I was never quite happy with the result. Eventually, I got really frustrated with myself, because I wanted to get on with the game, but I couldn't get past character creation. Yes, I can be seriously picky designing characters.

Character creator lighting is always really bad, character's never look half as good under the usual game lighting and there's always something you messed up that you don't notice for an hour or two. In Skyrim, I just said fuck it, and gave my character a big semitic nose and a bad haircut.

I've come to the conclusion that this is one of the best looking games of this generation. The shader work is really, really nice, like the running water on the stones of this level, and the glittering skin of the ogres, for example. Since the levels are so small, the geometry is also incredible, with quite a lot of bricks and stones poking out of the walls and floors, instead of just flat textures. It's also interesting to turn the graphics quality down to the lowest setting to see how bland and colorless everything becomes. The lighting work is equally well made.

Heard the proposition that RIAA and MPAA should join forces and form "Music And Film Industry Association"?

When I started playing Mass Effect 2, I spent a lot of time trying to create a pretty Shephard and I was never quite happy with the result. Eventually, I got really frustrated with myself, because I wanted to get on with the game, but I couldn't get past character creation. Yes, I can be seriously picky designing characters.

In the end, I decided to do the opposite. Instead of trying to create a pretty Shephard, I went for an ugly or at least an unconventional one. Now, she is one of my favorites and I can't imagine playing Mass Effect without her.

Half Life 2 is one of the most beautiful games in my opinion. A lot of games today don't even compare.

I think my favorite thing about the Source Engine is still how incredibly scalable it is. We've seen everything from a pretty impressive port of Half Life 2 on the original Xbox all the way to games like Portal 2. I think it's interesting that the Source engine launched with CS:S in '04 and is still being used in new games today. I know there have been prodigious updates to the engine since then, but I can't think of many other engines that have remained commercially viable for the better part of a decade.

I'm running a pretty outdated iece of hardware so it's less impressive when I say it, but I still think that HL2:DM with all settings cranked up is one of the best looking games I own.

Tried some Witcher 2 on ultra settings (everything enabled), 1680x1050, with ubersampling on. Framerate was low but playable (15-30 fps) and it is almost all GPU heavy, with 50% CPU and about 3 gigs ram usage at max load.